At that moment, the director himself dissolved, leaving behind the odor of cigar smoke and burnt coal. What was brimstone, actually? Just another name for sulfur, with a smell to wake you up, to make your eyes open in astonishment.
—
Dr. Jones rose from the bench and jammed his hat down on his head, lowering himself against the wind as he made his way to his car. Driving home, he saw the souls of the dead wandering about the city. They seemed not to see each other. No one smiled. The dead seemed puzzled by their condition, distracted, preoccupied. They appeared to be dressed in nondescript clothes from Goodwill, although some were naked. Among them ran a few children. None of the women were pretty, or the men handsome. They were beyond all that. Some sat on park benches or stood in bus shelters next to actual living people. The dead were identifiable not because they were semitransp
arent but because they walked several inches above the ground, and they did not reflect light but radiated it, like fireflies.
If I am going mad, Dr. Jones thought, remembering Herzog, it’s all right with me.
Once in the house, he touched the play button on the kitchen’s message machine. A nurse from the hospital had called to say that Dr. Jones should phone the unit as soon as possible. Something strange and quite wonderful had happened. He trudged up the stairs feeling as if he had shed some weight.
On an impulse, instinctively negotiating his way through the nearly perfect dark, he knocked softly on his son’s door before entering. Wearing his boxer shorts, Raphael lay sprawled not under the covers but on top of them, his seventeen-year-old body giving off a sweetly rank boy’s smell, leathery and acidic like that of a horse’s stable. The clock radio blinked on the bedside table, illuminating the poster over the bed of a superhero cheesecake girl who was apparently from another planet. She aimed a weapon-thing at the viewer. Her confrontational breasts pushed aggressively at her vinyl uniform. She had powerful thighs and the scowling face of an angel. Raphael’s tae kwon do awards and cups gleamed and glowed from two shelves across from the window. Dr. Jones gazed at his boy for a minute in the near dark. He could not look at his son in daylight without Raphael saying, “What?” So he watched him now. Minutes passed.
After leaving his son’s room, he knocked softly on his daughter’s bedroom door before entering. Theresa had always been a light sleeper, and, when Dr. Jones entered her room, she awoke and blinked.
“Daddy,” she yawned. She was still usually happy to see him, and she smiled absentmindedly now. “What are you doing in here?”
“Late night,” he said. “I just got home.”
“I was having a dream,” she told him. “I was having it when you came in.”
“A dream? About what?”
“It’s private,” she said. She was fourteen.
“Okay.” He approached her, kissed her on her forehead, and turned around to leave. “Sleep well. Have more dreams, sweetie.”
“Where have you been?” she asked. “There’s that smell.” She wrinkled her nose. She had a disobliging side. “You smell like…” But she appeared to have fallen asleep again before she finished the thought.
After leaving her room, Dr. Jones stood out on the second-floor landing waiting to go into his own bedroom, where he himself would soon be sleeping and where Susan was certainly sleeping now; he could hear her soft reassuring snores. His patient, the one who might actually be in recovery, having suffered a minor miracle, was named Da’neesha, and her mother had said that her daughter loved to dance and wanted to grow up to help people. He bowed his head. He tried to bless his family, his patients, all the afflicted everywhere in the world, but the blessing, being too large and weighing too much, and improbable besides, stayed with him and would not travel.
In the bedroom, he took off his clothes and got into bed next to his wife. Snuggling up behind her, he put his arm around her. When she made a noise, he whispered to her, “There’s something I want you to do.”
She made another noise.
“I want you to pray for me.”
“Hmmm,” she said.
“I don’t understand anything,” he whispered to her, “and I need to understand what’s happening to me.” The words would have sounded agitated if he had spoken them during the day, but it was nighttime, so what he said had no force, since the souls of the dead were still moving here and there outside his house on their endless pilgrimages, and they had made Dr. Jones sound nonsensical. Meanwhile, the doctor felt sleep overtaking himself so rapidly that he quickly forgot his request, and as he crossed the river and lost consciousness that night, he felt his own ghost arriving to embrace his body.
Avarice
My former daughter-in-law is sitting in the next room eating cookies off a plate. Poor thing, she’s a freeloader and can’t manage her own life anywhere in the world. Therefore she’s here. She’s hiding out in this house, for now, believing that she’s a victim. Her name’s Corinne, and she could have been given any sort of name by her parents, but Corinne happens to be the name she got. It’s from the Greek, kore. It means “maiden.” When I was a girl, no one ever called me that — a maiden. The word is obsolete.
Everyone else under this roof — my son and his second wife (my current daughter-in-law, Astrid), and my two grandchildren — probably wonders what Corinne is doing here. I suppose they’d like her to evaporate into what people call “thin” air. Corinne’s bipolar and a middle-aged ruin: when she looks at you, her vision goes right through your skin and internal organs and comes out on the other side. She mutters to herself, and she gives off a smell of rancid cooking oil. She’s unpresentable. If she tried to go shopping alone at the supermarket, the security people would escort her right back out, that’s how alarming she is.
The simple explanation for her having taken up residence here is that she appeared at the downtown Minneapolis bus depot last week, having come from Tulsa, where she lived in destitution. She barely had money for bus fare. My son, Wesley, her ex-husband, had to take her in. We all did. However, the more honest explanation for her arrival is that Jesus sent her to me.
Two weeks ago I was in the shower and felt a lump in my breast. I actually cried out in a moment of fear and panic. Then my Christian faith returned to me, and I understood that I would be all right even though I would die. Jesus would send someone to help me get across into the next world. The person He sent to me was Corinne. I know that this is an unpopular view among young people, but there is a divinity that shapes our ends, and at the root of every explanation is God, and at the root of God is love.
I go into the room where Corinne resides, knitting a baby thing. I pick up the cookie plate. “Thank you, Dolores,” she says. She gazes at me with her mad-face expression. “Those were delicious. I’ve always loved ginger cookies. Is there anything I can do for you?” she asks. She’s merely being polite.
“Soon,” I tell her. “Soon there will be.”
—
You get old, you think about the past, both the bad and the good. You have time to consider it all. You try to turn even the worst that has happened into a gift.
For example, my late husband, Mike, Wesley’s father, was killed by the side of the road as he was changing a tire. This was decades ago. He was the only man I ever married. I never had another one, before or after. A rich drunk socialite, a former beauty queen fresh from a night of multiple martinis with her girlfriends, her former sorority sisters, plowed right into him. Then she went on her merry way. Well, no, that’s not quite right. After she hit Mike, my husband’s body was thrown forward into the air, and then she ran over him, both the car’s front and rear tires. Somehow she made her way home with her dented and blood-spattered car, which she parked in the three-car garage before she tiptoed upstairs and undressed and got into bed next to her businessman husband. She clothed herself in her nightgown. She curled up next to him like a good pretty wife. The sleepy husband asked her — this is in the transcript